Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
MARMARA GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, sa.35, ss.40-54, 2017 (ESCI)
The aim of this study, as a disciplinary review, is to question the changing disciplinary practices of Turkish physical geography in a historical and empirical context. Four data sets (performances of physical geography publications in geography journals in Turkey, number of Ph.D. thesis made in physical geography, performances of geomorphology articles in the local earth science journals, performances of Turkish physical geography articles in the SCI-SSCI data base) are used in this study. Results show that, on one hand, Turkish physical geography dominated the whole discipline until the mid-1990s but afterwards the sub-discipline gradually became the small partner of geography in Turkey. On the other hand, Turkish physical geography practices simply ignored the quantitative revolution developed firstly in the Anglo-American geography by the time of 1960s, and reproduced its descriptive, pure empiricists and map-making practices onwards. While Turkish physical geography has had a very low publication records in local earth science journals as well as international journals, by 2005; it has been observed a relatively sharp upward trend in the rate of international publication records of Turkish physical geography since that time. This trend, however, is mostly actor-depended and does not indicate any institutional restructuring occurred in the discipline. The study concludes that, apart from its Anglo-American counterparts, Turkish physical geography has its own disciplinary context. Such a context shows that physical geography has been getting smaller in the discipline and also has not renewed its institutional structure considerably and also its international publication records depend mostly on the national/international collaboration in which Turkish partners take a small part. Such a complex disciplinary pattern clearly shows that Turkish geography, now, is represented by non-physical geographers locally while international disciplinary representation is made by physical geographers.